1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates generally to application performance monitoring and, more particularly, to using interceptors and out-of-band data to monitor the performance of Java 2 enterprise edition (J2EE) applications.
2. Related Art
Recent years have seen a rapid rise in the use of a variety of eBusiness applications. Many business transactions are now routinely performed by utilizing a variety of different applications executing on different platforms connected via computer networks. It is typically desirable to derive performance metrics associated with transactions executed by such applications. For example, obtaining a response time experienced by a user of such an application, e.g., the duration between the start of a user's request and the receipt of the requested information by the user, can provide valuable information regarding the application's efficiency. Further, such performance metrics can be utilized to determine compliance with service level agreements, or to generate alerts when selected metrics exceed pre-defined thresholds. Moreover, it is desirable to isolate and remove bottlenecks that significantly degrade the performance of an application.
In concert with the increased use of eBusiness applications, software architectures for developing them have become more efficient, albeit at the cost of increased architectural complexity. Such architectures typically rely on multiple, dynamically instantiated, and distributed software components to provide highly scalable eBusiness applications. The associated architectural complexity, however, can present significant challenges in developing methods and systems for monitoring transactions performed by the applications
Some systems for performing transaction performance monitoring are known in the art. These systems typically suffer from a number of shortcomings that limit their usefulness. For example, some traditional systems rely on source-code modification for providing transaction monitoring. However, source code modification can be cumbersome and time consuming. Further, in some cases, access to an application's source code may not be available.
Thus, there is a need for enhanced systems and methods for monitoring eBusiness transactions. More particularly, there is a need for such enhanced systems and methods that allow monitoring performance of transactions that originate from a computer system and can invoke software components in other computer systems.